Outbursts of Anger : An Ominous Turn in Race Relations

A 24-year-old black man, wanted by authorities on armed assault and parole violation charges, was shot to death by a white policeman during an attempted arrest. The next afternoon, the police chief was quoted as calling the incident a “justifiable shooting” and adding that it’s “business as usual.”

That night, hundreds of angry young blacks rampaged through downtown, smashing store windows with rocks and bottles, wrecking cars and besieging a city fire station.

Local officials are now trying to fathom why that reaction three weeks ago was so violent--the worst racial incident here since the riots sparked by the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

Merchant Complaint

“It doesn’t make any sense,” the assistant manager at one downtown business told a reporter from a Philadelphia paper. “If it’s all over that guy getting shot, why are they taking it out on the merchants?”

But to many national black civil rights leaders and spokesmen, the answers to the questions gripping Vineland seem disturbingly clear and apply to the rest of the country as well.

Despite decades of civil rights advances, they say, race relations in the United States may be entering a more ominous period. Blacks have reached the limits of their tolerance for what they view as increasingly hostile and open racism, these leaders say, and more and more they are striking back in ways that are apt to result in violence any time blacks feel unjustly provoked or attacked by whites.

Things Likely to Worsen

Few are willing to predict that the nation is headed toward a repeat of the racial chaos marked by the urban riots of the 1960s. But the consensus among black leaders appears to be that the relative calm that has characterized recent race relations is in peril, and that for the time being, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Vineland, a largely agricultural community about 30 miles southeast of Philadelphia, is only one example.

In New York City, a march last month by 7,500 black demonstrators to protest the slaying of a black teen-ager by a white gang erupted in a brick- and bottle-throwing melee after police attempted to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and marching on City Hall. Forty-four officers were injured in the clash, several of them seriously.

In Virginia Beach, Va., an annual gathering of more than 50,000 black college students during the Labor Day weekend broke out in two days of street confrontations after complaints by the students of police harassment and bullying. The disturbance in the seaside resort city, one of the worst incidents of urban violence in recent years, left more than 100 businesses damaged, two people wounded by gunshots and several dozen more injured.

Richard Wade, a white veteran of the civil rights struggle of the ‘60s who is now an urban history professor at the City University of New York, says these incidents add up to a frightening development.

Unlike in the traditional civil rights movement, he says, the philosophy of nonviolent struggle and interracial cooperation plays almost no role now on ghetto streets. “Blacks have moved toward black empowerment,” he said. “It’s empowerment, not civil rights, . . . and blacks see only blacks (helping blacks), and whites are not involved.”

Many other whites tend to look upon such disturbances as mindless onslaughts or else to dismiss them as isolated racial incidents. But black leaders and spokesmen maintain that such critics fail to grasp the deep frustrations and despair in the black community, and the desperation in many ghetto neighborhoods overwhelmed by poverty, crime, unemployment and social dislocation.

‘Hideous Things Happen’

“What is going on is exactly what Spike Lee said is going on in his movie ‘Do the Right Thing,’ ” said Roger Wilkins, a national black civil rights spokesman and professor of history and American culture at George Mason University. “Race is so heavy a burden in our society and life is so difficult for so many black people that it is inevitable that situations will explode and hideous things happen from time to time.

“And even decent people of good will who have a stake in preventing them can’t prevent them.”

Lee, a black film maker, said his movie was prompted by the death in 1986 of a black man who was hit by a car while fleeing from a white mob in the Howard Beach section of New York’s Queens borough. The film, released this summer, portrays confrontations between blacks and whites in predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant. When a young black man is killed by white police, rioting blacks burn down a neighborhood pizzeria owned by an Italian-American.

Wade contends that the film sends out a message that violence is a rational alternative in the black quest for equality--something “we never believed for a moment in the civil rights struggle.”

Many Blame Reagan

The film is a harbinger, say many civil rights leaders and race relations experts. Many of them also blame former President Ronald Reagan for the volatility of race relations today.

“A great deal of this climate got set during the last eight years as the national leadership began to attack civil rights activities . . . and those kinds of things,” said John E. Jacob, president of the National Urban League. More recently, U.S. Supreme Court decisions that undercut affirmative action and minority set-aside programs have been particularly galling, he said.

As a result, Jacob maintains, there has been a growing bitterness among black Americans--particularly the large proportion who have not shared in the economic and social benefits of the Reagan era.

At the same time, he contends, the constraints on racism have loosened.

“The Reagan era unleashed a feeling in this nation that it’s all right to behave the way you feel,” he said. “What we had done in the civil rights movement of the 1960s was to put in place some regulatory instruments that told people: ‘Even if you feel that way, you can’t act that way.’ But the last eight years have liberated people from much of that.”

Charles King, a race relations expert who heads the Atlanta-based Urban Crisis Center, says that the continuing racial separation of whites and blacks in housing and schools means that blacks and whites “don’t know each other. Violence springs out of the isolation and separation. . . .”

In addition, King says, the lack of black leaders of the stature of Martin Luther King Jr. has also served to harshen race relations.

No Strong Leadership

“There’s no voice among the black leadership that is heard by blacks that compares with the strong moral and ethical leadership we used to have under King,” he said. “Jesse Jackson has used himself up. He’s jumped from one thing to another, looking for the opportunity to shift gears for every incident that takes place.”

Brenda Andrews, publisher of a black-oriented newspaper in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, said: “We’re seeing a recurrence of the kind of hatred and bigotry that we saw in the ‘60s. Unless there are changes--like increased opportunities in employment, education . . . and housing--we’re going to see some pain. It’s not going to be the Martin Luther King response. We know there can be better times, because we were on the road to more equitable opportunities. Now, to have to be reversed and go back twenty-some years is something people are not going to stand for.”

To many blacks, the perception that American society is backsliding from the dramatic strides of the civil rights movement is both depressing and provoking.

In Vineland, for example, one black resident, a transplant from the Deep South who asked to remain unidentified, said that when she moved here several years ago, she was called a racial epithet for the first time in 20 years. “I thought I was in a time warp,” she said.

“Don’t forget, we’re living in Ku Klux Klan country,” said Jynell Harris, a high school teacher and executive board member of the Cumberland County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Sam Clark, president of the county NAACP chapter, says that the racial unrest that swept through the community with the killing on Aug. 27 of Samuel Williams by Officer Paul Letizia might have been avoided if city officials had addressed complaints about alleged police brutality earlier.

“Frustration has been building for some time” against the police in the black community, he said. He also points out that although blacks make up 12% of the city’s 54,000 population, only one of the 95 police officers is black.

Clark blamed Police Chief Joseph Cassisi for inciting the spree of violence with his remarks on Williams’ death. “It was a justifiable shooting,” the chief was quoted as saying in the Vineland Daily Journal. “I’m sure the law-abiding citizens want the law upheld. As far as I’m concerned, it’s business as usual.”

Cassisi later issued a clarification in which he explained that what he meant to say was that, in his opinion, the killing appeared as if it might be justifiable homicide and that, by “business as usual,” he meant that the police department would continue with its normal routine while investigating the shooting incident.

According to Letizia, Williams, who had previously been arrested several times on a number of drug charges, threatened him with an iron construction rod as he attempted to make an arrest.

The outbreak of violence was preceded earlier in the day by a peaceful, nonviolent protest against the shooting. More than 100 members of the black community marched on the police station wearing red arm bands and chanting: “We want justice, we want justice.”

Rioters Gather

Hours later, angry rioters gathered on Landis Avenue, the main downtown business strip, and began a three-hour rampage, throwing rocks and bottles. Windows were broken in at least a dozen stores. Twenty windows in the fire department station were smashed by a crowd surrounding the building.

Four injuries were reported in the aftermath, but only one was serious--a head injury received by a news photographer after he was overrun by rioters. About 30 people were arrested on charges that included aggravated assault, burglary and criminal mischief.

Mayor Harry Curley, who has named a special task force to investigate the causes of the disturbance, says that racial tensions between the police and Vineland’s minority community--which includes almost 11,000 Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans--are “always an ongoing thing.”

Curley said that blacks are the poorest of the poor in Vineland and are unlikely to improve their position because of cutbacks in federal domestic programs and shifting economic priorities under the Reagan Administration.

“Reaganomics has killed them,” he said, citing as an example the drastic reductions in federal housing aid. “There’s been no moderate-income housing put up in this community in the last eight years.”

By contrast, the racial disturbances in Virginia Beach involved mostly students from predominantly black colleges and universities in the Midwest and along the East Coast.

For about a decade, much as white college students invade Ft. Lauderdale on Florida’s Atlantic coast each year during Easter break, black students have been coming to Virginia Beach for an annual end-of-summer vacation party every Labor Day weekend. Over that period of time, the crowds who have gathered at the predominantly white resort in the Hampton Roads area have grown from perhaps fewer than 1,000 to more than 50,000.

Bad blood between the community and the students has been building for some time. Virginia Beach officials say it was because of the rowdiness and disruptiveness of the students.

The students, on the other hand, say that it was because the town simply was not used to having so many blacks at one time and did not particularly want them or welcome them.

The increasingly tense racial situation nearly came to a head last year when thousands of revelers, unable to gain entry to an oversold entertainment program at the Pavilion, a city-owned arena, began to rush doors and pry locks to get inside. Some students inside, city officials say, also caused significant damage.

As a result, city officials informed the entertainment promoters that the Pavilion would not be available for this year’s Greekfest.

Strict Ordinances

In advance of this year’s Greekfest, city officials imposed strict new ordinances regarding public behavior on the beach and in the streets and arranged for state troopers and National Guard soldiers to be on standby if additional security were needed.

When the students arrived Sept. 1, they also encountered jacked-up hotel room rates, lack of room service and screening by hotel management of passes at the front door at many hotels.

“They just didn’t want the students there,” said newspaper publisher Andrews.

Students also grew resentful of the heavy police presence, she said, with officers handing out tickets for every minor infraction--jaywalking, playing radios too loud or blocking traffic.

Wilkins, the black civil rights spokesman, said that two weeks before the Labor Day weekend, he was having his car repaired at a dealership in Virginia Beach and overhead some white employees.

“They said: ‘This year for Greekfest, we’re gonna be ready for them. We’re gonna have the National Guard in here, and we’re gonna keep control. The hotels don’t want them, and the hotels won’t take them. We’re gonna keep them in their place.’ ”

Damage Assessed

What ignited the start of Sunday morning’s violence is still unclear, but by the time the two days of disturbances were quelled, more than 1,200 people had been charged with offenses, resulting in about 220 arrests, according to one report. City officials said that millions of dollars in damage was inflicted by the rioting youths.

Patrick Frett, 23, of Queens, N.Y., said that he was arrested after he left a hotel during a fire alarm. “They took the stick and put it to my chest,” Frett said. “I said: ‘Do I have a right?’ and (an officer) said, ‘Don’t say a word. Don’t move.’ ” He said he was not told why he was arrested until he was behind bars and charged with throwing a rock, a charge he denied.

Mary Cox, an attorney from Washington, D.C., said that she was struck on the head by a policeman while searching for two nieces in the crowded streets.

Compared to Vietnam

“I thought I was in Vietnam,” she told a local reporter.

Among the nation’s big cities, perhaps the most volatile in terms of race relations is New York.

In recent years, blacks have been the victims of a string of violent racial incidents, most of them in blue-collar, white ethnic neighborhoods.

In addition, blacks say that Mayor Edward I. Koch has added fuel to the flames with his subtle and not-so-subtle rhetoric following racial incidents in the city.

Blacks also have been up in arms over what they call the highly negative stereotypes of the black community in the mass media. They cite, among other examples, the news portrayal of the black youths involved in a “wilding” attack against a white female jogger earlier this year in Central Park as “animals,” “savages” and “degenerates.” Such terms are rarely, if ever, used to paint whites involved in heinous crimes, blacks argue.

The victory of David N. Dinkins, the black Manhattan borough president, over Koch in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary may be a sign of the city’s weariness over racial divisiveness. Dinkins ran a low-key campaign that stressed unity and ended up with one-third of the white vote.

City About to Explode

But “it’s at the point now where it’s only a few degrees from boiling over,” said the Rev. Gary Simpson, associate pastor of the 10,000-member Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, one of New York’s largest black Baptist congregations, referring to the racial tension in the city.

“You get a sense that whites have no value for a black life, that it’s open season on blacks.”

The fear among blacks, even in non-threatening situations, can be palpable.

A black West Indian who lives in Queens said that she and her family were recently traveling through Brooklyn to attend the annual West Indian Day parade when their car was inadvertently sideswiped.

The white man who was driving the other car offered to pay for the damage immediately if they would follow him home. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said they arrived in a white ethnic neighborhood, and her brother went inside. The thought of white violence against blacks in the city suddenly seized her.

“My brother was gone for nearly 10 minutes and in that time I experienced a fear I had never experienced before. I’ve lived in New York for five years and in London, England, for 16 years, and I’ve never felt that way before. We didn’t know what might happen to us.”

She says that they got the money all right and left without any incident. But she adds: “We got out of the area quickly.”

Fear of Danger

The slaying of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in the predominantly Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst last month has heightened the fear of danger for many blacks.

Hawkins was shot to death in what police say was a case of mistaken identity as he and three companions were walking through Bensonhurst on the night of Aug. 23 to look at a used car.

Police said that a gang of whites mistook the four black youths for friends of a young Bensonhurst woman who had previously jilted one of the attackers and had announced her intentions to date black and Latino men.

Hawkins’ slaying has been the focus of several protest marches in the Bensonhurst neighborhood by black demonstrators and of the thwarted march on City Hall during a “Day of Outrage” demonstration.

Suspect Surrounded

On Thursday, a melee nearly erupted outside a Brooklyn courthouse after one of the seven young whites arrested in Hawkins’ slaying emerged from a court appearance. About 150 black teen-agers surrounded the young white man and his attorney and started heaving stones and bottles and shouting angry remarks before police intervened and dispersed the crowd. Two officers suffered minor injuries.

“The mood of the black community in Brooklyn is angry,” said Njeri Abdul Mumit, 35, a Bedford-Stuyvesant native. “Even people who have not been politically aware or community-minded are to the point where they want change.”

George Holden, a black political organizer, added that young blacks with whom he has talked “feel like it’s coming to a point of civil war.”